by Brooke Crothers
IBM will release a radical new chip next year that will go into a University of Illinois supercomputer in a quest to build what may become the world’s fastest supercomputer. That university’s supercomputer center is a storied place, home to both famous fictional and real supercomputers. The notorious HAL 9000 sentient supercomputer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” was built in Urbana, Illinois, presumably on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus.
Though not aspiring to artificial intelligence, the IBM Blue Waters project supercomputer, like the HAL 9000 series, will be able to do massively complex calculations in an instant and, like HAL, be built in Urbana-Champaign. It is being housed in a special building on the Urbana-Champaign campus specifically for the computer that will theoretically be capable of achieving 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today. (A petaflop is 1 quadrillion floating point operations per second, a key indicator of supercomputer performance.)
